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On The Durability Of Usability Guidelines
Ant writes "Useit.com's Durability of Usability Guidelines article says about 90% of usability guidelines from 1986 are still valid. However, several guidelines are less important because they relate to design elements that are rarely used today... The 944 guidelines related to military command and control systems built in the 1970s and early 1980s; most used mainframe technology. You might think that these old findings would be completely irrelevant to today's user interface designers. If so, you'd be wrong."
I wouldn't think that the guidelines are completely useless in today's world, after all, a good gjuideline is a good guideline, especially if it's broad enough to cover multiple situations. However, I'm quite certain that the list could use some updating :)
Remind me of War Games where they replace humans by autonomous cimpouters. No need of User Interface :)
The thing is, interfaces are still relatively similar to how they were 20 years ago. We still use a CLI (not all of us, but enough to matter), and when in a GUI, the graphics have improved, but not much is really radically different.
Make sure any self-aware military machine, in control of nuclear weapons can play tic-tac-toe against itself.
Proof that you can have nicely laid out articles, in very simple HTML, without making any assumptions about the browser. I like my browser pages long and relatively narrow (like A4 or Letter paper), and I'm fed up of pages that (for some perverse region) want to force me to take up the entire screen width...
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
They're *guidelines* not *rules*, so they should be sufficiently general to still be relevant today
The World Wide Web has made usability an even bigger and thornier issue; at least with normal applications you can design an interface however you like. When presenting text or a Web-based app, you're much more constrainted by browser bugs and the like.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
I studied Useability at University in the late 80s/early 90s. One of the key elements was the on-going battle between WILI and KISS.
WILI means "Well I Like It" and is normally for those interfaces designed, built and initially used by one person or group.
KISS means "Keep It Simple Stupid"
There are many other rules, reachability etc but under-pinning them all is the concept that WILI is bad and KISS is good.
The Web was a whole bunch of WILIes ignoring 30 years of interface design. I'm not stunned at all that lessons from 20 years ago are still valid, because people are still the same and interactivity is still the same. Mainframes are very similar to the web as it tends to be a modal interaction model (click......wait......read.....click.... etc etc etc) there are some different concepts when elements are being dynamically updated and adjusting based on context and input. Most of that research is 20+ years old as well though.
WILI v KISS, its the battle of "art" v "HCI". HCI is a discipline that takes in ergonomics, psychology and computing, and produces the best engineering. "art" or "creative interfaces" are the equivalent of a chocolate teapot, it doesn't matter if you like it... its still rubbish.
The best interface is the one you don't notice, it just does its job and enables you to get on.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Now we don't have a "unique identification for each display" like an ugly serial number. We have a URL.
Something that's a lot shorter and easier to remember and incredibly useful today (despite having been around quite a while) are Shniederman's 8 Golden Rules of UI design.
i sino/rules.html
Obligatory linkage:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/almstrum/cs370/elv
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Slow Down Cowboy!
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It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment
WTF is "a fair chance at posting a comment"!?
The two examples of unneeded guidelines still are needed today, they are just in a slightly different form. The one with having a unique variable on your screen to show the user where they are on the program. This is still a good idea and still needs to be used, and is used sometimes. Look at the title on your web browsers Every time you go to a different web page the title of the window changes. Or at least should, and every screen in an application should have a different title. Some programs don't and when people call you for a problem you ask them where they are at in the program and they will just tell you the program name. If you are lucky they will tell you the name of all the buttons they clicked. But if you gave every window title a unique name say PROGRAMNAME: Intro Screen, PROGRAMNAME: ECO screen. then people may be able to help you pinpoint where the problem is, as well as in giving directions.
Secondly using function keys, for common to use functions. Well they are called hot keys now and they still are relevant. And I know from experience. I once program a section in a program that had no hotkeys and I got the worst feedback from the program because of it. Still a lot of programs are data entry programs in a way and hot keys keep the speed up. Also on the same vain as hotkeys there are thinks like task bars, or docks, with the most common tools available on the screen so you don't need to navigate a slew of menu items just go to the next part of the program.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That and people really haven't changed to invalidate most of them.
Usability guides are too hard to read.
rewriting history since 2109
In the first paragraph, the author already mentions that the 977 found guidelines pale against the 1277 guidelines he('we') offers.
Upon entry of said page, user is shown a bill of 100's $ to buy these guidelines.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
You might think that these old findings would be completely irrelevant to today's user interface designers. If so, you'd be wrong.
/. in lynx mode. It is ironic that a useit.com article should be published on /., perhaps this is proof that ed's (or dev's!) do not read the articles!! :-)
/. fares quite well usability wise... just a few misplaced links, and some, "I have to click here to get to here, if I am here" kind of reverse navigation. its all good.
I was assuming since we had evolved so much in the last years, and had greatly increased capacity for memory, 3 legs, 6 hands, and 11 eyes, that human computer interaction would have changed significantly....
Human factors haven't changed since adam. Get used to it.
Respect to Jakob Nielson [guru dude] and his position to bring usability to the limelight. I also congratulate apple and kde and gnome for having prevelant sections of thier websites detailing standards and usability guides.
Usability needs refining when a new mental model (searching, blogging, data structures) come into place. usually through technology being adapated by people, and it is basically keeping up with what people expect from a site. (and this is usually based on defacto standards)
But anyway, his retrospective columns are usually worth a read, this one is no different.
Some points are a bit 'semantically contrived' like:
Even this invalidated guideline continues to contain a core of truth: it's good for users to know where they are and what they can do on each screen.
talking about 'screen identifiers', this could be a bread crumb trail, an 'inside this section' it changes based on the shape and profile of you data/site and the target medium.
I browse
Just playing.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Guideline 4.2.6 said to provide a unique identification for each display in a consistent location at the top of the display frame. This guideline worked well in the target domain of mainframes: Users typically navigated only a few screens, and having a unique ID let them understand their current location. The IDs also made it easy for manuals and help features to refer to specific screens.
Today, screen identifiers would clutter the screens with irrelevant information. They would not help modern users, who move freely among numerous locations.
Even this invalidated guideline continues to contain a core of truth: it's good for users to know where they are and what they can do on each screen. The current recommendation is to provide a headline or title that concisely summarizes each screen's purpose.
Guideline 3.1.4.13 said to assign a single function key to any continuously available feature. This made sense for mainframe interfaces because they relied extensively on function keys to speed up the interaction. Also, mainframe systems were so heavily moded that very few functions were available across all system areas; the few that were obviously deserved special treatment.
Modern systems attempt to be modeless, so many features have become ubiquitous and accessible from anywhere. Furthermore, function keys are no longer the primary way of operating computers. Given these two changes, it no longer makes sense to assign function keys to constantly available features.
These both still valid today. Panel codes are uniquely identified in use and with HTML the URL is the unique id, so that rule is still active today.
The second rule about comman "function keys", these can be the Fx keys as well as the CTRL keys. Take example Copy in Windows ^C, Paste ^V or Find ^F again standardized between apps and OS like.
In the end consitance is always required to allow users faster interfaces and better interaction.
While the machines have evolved, the humans have not, so it should be no surprise that usability standards for humans would change so little.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Of course most of those guidelines are still valid. Human behavior hasn't changed, and that's what these guidelines are based on.
The real trick is getting people to follow the damn guidelines. Programmers should have them tattooed into their foreheads. They should be able to recite them verbatim, and show examples for every guideline.
Apple got it right with their Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (and associated Thought Police). Following these guidelines shouldn't be an option or an afterthought, it should be at the core of everything a programmer does.
Wow.... we could have Windows applications that are as reliable and usable as nuclear weapons.
Better than the other way around, I suppose.
As a person who designs user interfaces, I'd have to say that, while those usability guidelines are in fact dated, they're still quite useful as the general concept carries on. There's certain guidelines that, although related to older technology, are still relevant, much like iterative software development developed in the 1970s is still relevant today.
On another note, doesn't anyone find it ironic that the section508 government website doesn't even conform to the same accessibility guidelines it lists?
Cheers, James Carr
The command line is easier for many operations, including most involving a single file. It is also a lot more stable compared to the status of a GUI on one machine, and compared to how GUI's vary by machines. Icons tend to vary and change location, look, etc.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Just look at CRMs. Probably 99% of what most people use CRMs for can be done with file sharing (Netware, AFS, Samba) with ACLs, plus a local index, plus a web server. But that's not nearly painful enough and merely putting some files in a folder which can be seen from the web doesn't get the praise resulting from paying huge consulting fees and conquering a stack of manuals.
High consulting fees and training costs also show up on the books, which allows the herd mentality to kick in.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
The purpose of software is to solve a problem.
The method used for effective problem solving never really changes.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
I was lucky enough to have UI design class forced upon me in my University studies. I think that everyone taking a degree in computer science (I took Software engineering) should have to take this course. Despite the fact that my professor was pretty bad, I still learned a lot of useful things from that class.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
In 1986, most office workers were familiar with a desk's top, a file cabinet, and a stack of documents. Almost none had ever seen a computer, and couldn't visualize a directory structure or other virtual organization of their data. So virtual "desktop", "folders", menus, dialog boxes, mouse, and other now-familiar artifacts of the Xerox system adopted by Apple for the Mac were a way to leverage people's physical experience into computer techniques.
20 years later, more office workers are familiar with the "desktop" than with hanging file folders. Most "civilians" are familiar with a desktop on their computer than in their home. The office prop simulations are the starting reference for reality now, and are more of a straitjacket than a life preserver. We need a new paradigm, especially because mobile devices need a desktop about as much as a desktop needed a papertape reader, or a fish needs a bicycle.
We've got to get our info architecture universally separated into tiers. At least a data/logic/presentation (M/V/C) model, which is possibly the most flexible that can work as legacy desktop systems. As the components become more distributed, humans will directly interact more with "mere" multimedia terminals, their ticket into the heterogenous networked virtual world overlaying the physical, in which all communications work is performed. Implicit state management, without human intervention (saving, login: all invisibly automated) must be the norm; otherwise, state must be discarded outside the transaction, which must complete immediately. Universal APIs and network protocols must join the tiers together, so any of a number of choices can be selected for that particular operation, depending on the mutual combination of human/corporate parties to any transaction. For example, data entry/report must be sent to the presentation layer in a format independent of rendering *sense*, like sight or hearing (or even Braille touch, etc), rather than the current paradigm of "device independence". And when an extended subset of, say, an office desktop plus a car's internal environment and (of course) their common media player (eg. stereo) are operated from a "mobile phone" console, rather than a notebook computer or projection/tablet controlroom, the frameworks for those Human/Computer Interfaces must be only as different as appropriate to the constraints of those scenarios, which are severely different.
The 1980s got "computing for the masses" by making desktop computing look like old skills. Now, desktop computing is an old skill, that holds many back. The new paradigm that is emerging, mainly among mobile devices, must take into account not only the new scenario, but the new wisdom that computing paradigms change drastically, but the old ones must stick around too, if only because many people won't want to learn two different paradigms in one lifetime. Enough new data and operations are undeniably floating around now that a paradigm shift is inevitable very shortly. In the words of William Gibson, "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet". Let's use the vast momentum we've generated by wisely using desktops to get us here, by moving far beyond them.
--
make install -not war
The fact that I get my work done faster using a command-line 95% of the time, and manipulate GUI elements using conventions established in the 80s around the X11 project suggest that computers haven't gotten that much easier to use. In fact, in their rush to become more usable for the uninitiated, I think they become harder for experienced people to use.
When I sit down at Windows or Mac, my productivity drops. Eventually it comes to a total standstill because I'm so frustrated that I have to stop and find out how to emulate x-mouse under the workstation I'm in front of today. Or find some alt/ctrl-click window resize equivalent since every laptop has a difficult to control pointing device and positioning it over the exact lip of the edge to drag is pretty troublesome. Or look for some xkill equivalent and realize that most systems don't have one and that I really do have to wait for this sluggish application to decide to respond.
I'm still trying to figure out how to make MacOS X usable since everyone sits me in front of it expecting me to enjoy it more because it's "UNIX underneath, somewhere". Then I spend a few minutes to try to remember where to find Terminal and then spend another 10 minutes trying to adjust the colors/font settings so that it's white on black and not 6pt font. I've been doing it for about 4 years now so I figured I'd be an expert on it, but I never can seem to remember. Maybe it's because one day Apple decided to improve it and moved the widgets around and I haven't been able to make any sense of it since. I usually give up and go to a different computer or suffer with the terminal as-is, hoping that I get my work done before I go blind. At least when I can't figure out how to make gnome-terminal or kterm do what I want, I can ALT-CTRL-F1 and get the virtual console which is usually a heavenly 80x25.
Also, apparantly no one but me feels that MacOS X's interface is too slow, even on really really powerful machines.
Complaints that no one understands. *sigh*
In some cases you might need the second guideline:
If it breaks, shake it a little.
printf($randomline(sigs.txt) \n "-- "$randomline(authors.txt));
-- myself
Academia is way too good for this hypocrite.
He shamelessly compliments the success of sites such as Google for providing useful information easily to users.
Of course, you can easily get useful information from Jakob, for a price.
If he relegated his reports solely to Intranets, the so be it. However, not providing extensive usability information to the Internet at large simply reduces the chance that web design will incorporate his ideas, which is completely contradictory. That is, if you think anything he has to say about web design is worth anything other than huffy, bloated common sense.
Who cares about usability these days, when there is so much bells-and-whistles to add? Come on, neither your boss, your marketing dept nor the bosses of your customers care about good UI. The poor schmucks who will have to use your masterpiece don't get anything to say.
Sad but true.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Although it is an interesting article, to be honest I find Jacob Nielsen to be the least helpful in the field. I prefer zeldman.com, joeclark.org, webstandards.org and alistapart.com.
Absolutely correct (and his nonsence about common identifications of the "screen" you're working on being outdated, well, guess he never noticed the title bar in his windows...)
Also, take a look at the Orange book - it's from 1985, and close to 100% of what you find in there is as relevant and correct as ever, but unlike the user interface guidelines, the computing industry has not (except for a few notable exceptions) seemed to really converge towards compliance here.
(closest thing you get in a general purpose OS is Trusted Solaris, certified against the LSPP, which corresponds pretty much to the 'B2' profile from Orange book. Nobody ever made a general purpose OS that even approached B3 (let alone A1 and beyond) from Orange book).
With all the "computer security" fluff in the media these days, it's easy to feel disappointed at the "evolution" in the IT world when you read the 20 year old cook-book to how secure systems can be built.
Nobody cared enough. And people pay dearly for that today.
A good article and a good site too. I always had pretentions of reading more into the HCI/usability arena.
..." menus on the correct side of the window.
You would think with 20+ years of generaly accepted interface guidelines, look and feel consistency, etc. that AOL would get their Nutscrape browser working with the "File Edit
Don't get me crapping-on about that damn, godforsaken RealPlayer. What the hell is that supposed to be? Ack.
I wish people would just try and stick to conventions. After all, how many times are you fooled into pulling open a door with a pull-handle fitted when the door is actually push-only?
Or is that just me?
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
Firefox is the only mainstream application I can think of that actually removed features from an application in order to improve usability. Bravo.
Seriously, you may have not seen what has happened with the gnome proyect, do you?
Agreed.
But recall that in early Winamp (version 2?) the skin only effectively "coloured-in" the various UI components. There were some terrible skins available but the basic one was okay, if a little fiddly with tiny buttons. However it was not until later versions, like the unforgivable WMP, the skinning effectively changed the whole shape of the app. Nasty.
Oh yeah, "personaliozed menus" are crap too. Always the first thing I switch off.
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
Skins. Goodbye consistency. I blame Winamp for this, although Windows Media Player has taken the problem to dizzying new heights.
In (older)Winamp you cannot change how things are positioned with the skins, so it is rather consistant, and since it was made for Windows at a time before custom themes it was very nessescary IMO. I have yet to see a good media player that use native widgets, the native widgets aren't made for such button-filled interfaces as media players tend to be.
So blame on, but I still think that Winamps skinning is part of what makes it the best music player around.
There are a lot of winamp skins that are entirely simple and useable though, with the buttons mostly where you'd expect them to be. And I tend to use those in the long run, because I don't want to spend time figuring out which of the facets on the anime-mecha-bug-zoid skin is the stop button.
Machine9dotNet
1.4.15 Explicit Tabbing to Data Fields
Require users to take explicit keying ("tabbing") action to move from one data entry field to the next; the computer should not provide such tabbing automatically.
If only M$ had been listening. I know I'm not the only one here who hates that damn auto-tabbing IP address entry box!
BTW, anyone interested should read M$'s HIG sometime. I hope they've started following it recently, because there were many sections I found where the HIG said one thing and their Office suite did something completely different.
Also, read Apple's HIG, Gnome's HIG, KDE's HIG... Subtle differences, interesting things.
Of those early guidelines, 78% continue to be valid and relevant. Of course, my early guidelines are only ten to eleven years old, so it's hardly surprising that they'd score better than twenty-year-old guidelines.
Ummm... didn't he rate the durability of the twenty-year-old guidelines at 90%? So what makes his own inability to produce anything so enduring (only 78%) "score better"?
Usability of the article: 95%
Basic mathematics: 20%
Winamp has sucked from day one. Its ability to use skins meant that none of the controls were standard Windows controls, including the bar at the top of the window, and the text. So it didn't scale with the Windows UI ("use large fonts" setting).
It also looked horrible, with tiny controls and text.
Windows Mediaplayer sucks even more, with moronic skins that only work half the time (try running the app full-screen: it'll revert to the default appearance).
Am I the only one who is concerned about the base fact that the concept of 'intuitive' is deeply cultural ? Reminds me of the kids who scored poorly on IW tests because it had questions like: Cup is to Saucer like Hat is to Head. The kids who had never seen a Saucer or a Hat were screwed.
In my experience (14 years of weapons system/ military test systems design) the real benefit of milspecs/standards is that they are mono-cultural- Military culture ONLY. They assume NOTHING, and define only those things that personnel who fit the military human standards (height, weight, strength, dexterity, vision, etc..) are capable of doing.
"Modern Intuitive" GUI's and CLI's are intuitive to the designer ONLY. Icon to hold documents together as a staple ? Great ! What about cultures that use straight pins instead of staples ? etc., etc, etc... Good design means knowing your audience. Great design means BEING your audience.
Article summary: nothing important changed. Film at 11.
what the hell kind of statistic is that??
jacob neilsen is 10% valid
I've seen a demonstration of what they call "Music Retrieval System Based on User Preferences" which is a music search engine and a retrieval system that can discover and suggest music based on a user's preferences. The project is still in its infant stages but surprisingly it works well on a collection of thousands of popular music CDs. This is currently being developed by KDDI Corporation and will be integrated to next generation mobile services in Japan.
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
Well, skins aren't much of a problem, because the user must change it, and if he changes, he must be able to know how to use it (or undo the change). The other problems you are addressing are very M$ centric, and just makes one think that M$ usability is shrinking toghether with their security (I didn't realised that before).
Rethinking email
People's minds differ, but similar principles apply, so using yourself as a guide is not too bad. Using each member of a group, individually, as a guide is better still, especially is you have different thinking styles. And usability need not be maximum stupidity, although you do need to make compromises in that direction. One solution might be to use all of the staff in your feasibility study, including the cleaner and the receptionist!
WWLI (well we like it) combined with awareness of some basic principles might then give the best answer, but how to ensure self-critical goodwill is a managent problem. I suspect that you need to start with a manager who has those qualities him or herself.
Wikileaks, no DNS
"Skins. Goodbye consistency. I blame Winamp for this, although Windows Media Player has taken the problem to dizzying new heights."
You think that's bad? Can you explain to me in a rational-and-well-thought-out manner why Spybot: Search and Destroy has a skinning mechanism? Why exactly would you need to skin your anti-Spyware program?
Firefox is the only mainstream application I can think of that actually removed features from an application in order to improve usability. Bravo.
This happens all the time in the commercial software world. Sometimes its more successful than others. Look at 'light' versions of professional apps: Photoshop Elements, Final Cut Express and even Windows PX Home edition (like I said, sometimes its successful, sometimes, not so much). In most cases the UI is also simplified in the consumer versions.
Where they good princeples to begin with?
Or are they just seen as good principles because we've been trained to use them over 20 years.
/. is a bunch of nerds at a million typewriters. It's not a political conspiracy determined to undermine your beliefs.
when the voice dialling arrived on cell phones a few years back, I was demonstrating how this worked to a colleague of mine so that he was less likely to cause a traffic accident when dialling the office when he said "Don't be ridiculous I don't want to be seen talking to a phone". Perhaps he just didn't realise that it was quite normal to talk to a phone or was he simply confused that he was pressing buttons on a computer.
Over a decade back, my employer wrote this application that ran on a DOS platform. It did its thing and it was replaced with a Win3.1 application. Last year, I was cleaning out some old files and found the original DOS specs. They had some stuff that had been obsoleted, but the core calculations had not changed and they provided test cases that were pure gold for the current rewrite.
Mindful of this, I am careful to retain specs of even the deadest of projects, because 90% of the time someone with pointy hair will say, "Make this like that except..."
When I have the specs from some old project, I have a rigorous description of "that" that I'm not likely to get from the management types. I also get a different perspective on the problem that can be very useful if I can aggregate it.
Unforunately not. One of the most annoying features of MS Outlook (Exchange-mode) is that you can'tedit addresses once they've been verifed (which typically happens in the background). This makes perfect sense if you're writing/replying to your collegues, but notfor SMTP addresses.
Let's say you just typo:d something like wniston.chruchill@averylongtimeagohewasprimeminist er.gov.uk.
As soon as Outlook sees that it's an SMTP adreess - blam - instantly accepted and converted into a clickable link (not that anything happens) and, of course locked from direct edits. Now you need to right-click, select properties, edit, click OK. Sigh...
Pretty inane and completely inconsistent with anything else, like... a rather prominent feature of Windows called Explorer. It goes into edit/rename mode for files&folders following a "slow" single-click. I happen to hate it because of it's super-sensitivity when I'm dazed, and for it's delay when I'm not, so I always hit F2 instead. For those who didn't know it works like File | Rename, ah, well, that's another MS speciality: have a shortcut key active, but don't tell anyone about it.
I would like to expand on your thoughts a bit, as I do a lot of interface design for the web and shrink-wrap software.
I read people like Jakob Nielsen and appreciate what they have to say. But, most importantly, I read everything he said with a critical eye. I'm pretty sure he'd like that. Frankly, some of his rules are just incorrect or highly suspect, but most are as true as the sky being blue.
I liken User Interface design to putting on a good outfit. What you're wearing depends on the type of event (your audience), what looks good on you (your subjct matter), and what statement you want to make (what rules you bend.) In my opinion it's the last part, the rules you want to bend, that makes all the difference when designing the visuals. The core funcitonality should really follow most of the rules, but the visuals can play with these elements in a good way based on your target audience and subject matter.
If all interfaces looked like Useit.com we'd be awash in a sea of boring. Nielsen ackwoledges this, and even says in his recommendations that you shouldn't follow ever letter of the "law."
The problem we have is that a lot of decision makers are CHRONIC "WILI" types-- they don't have any practical experience in user interface design and/or a need to care. It's not that all of them are this way, it just seems that people in places like Microsoft ARE. And why is that? It's the corporate climate that nurtures good design practice. If the people at the top don't believe in good design it will filter down to every project manager. Your products will suffer and you will have to rely on the shark-like cunning of your sales force instead of the beautiful simplicity of your user interfaces.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Actually, I like the hidden menus - its a nice usability feature that keeps the unused things hidden. I think you just need to get used to it and then you love it.
The only disadvantage is that the menu items change around until its fully trained which items you do and don't use.
Great ! What about cultures that use straight pins instead of staples ?
This is called "localization". Usually this is translating the menu items / text, but it can mean a lot more.
...and Jakob Nielsen is not an interface designer. He's an analyst and a pundit extrodinaire but he's not a designer.
Any rule of UI design should be broken if there's a solution that benefits the user more than the one that follows the traditional guidelines. Now the reason that we have all these HCI folks busily compiling lists of the 'right' way to do things is that they didn't actually teach them how to design anything in their masters' program.
The sad fact of our industry is that the people who reach 'guru' status tend to spend more time bolstering their book [and overpriced PDF report] sales and retainers for giving speeches than they do trying to advance the state of the art. I can't blame them, book tours are probably easier than real work anyway.
1. Skins are a good selling point. I also think the ability to make your workstation look, and work the way you want is a boon to efficiency.
However, having said that - it is important to both understand the standards, and have public computers stick to the standards.
I think for any home use computer system, there needs to be a balance reached between the equivalent of having your home decorated like the local school, and having things randomly thrown about.
People want to have some control over their environment, and having the option to make the computer look and work the way you do is very important IMO. Otherwise it's like a car where you cannot adjust the seat or mirrors.
2. I actually like that feature. If I go to the start menu 1000 times, and half of the time I click on notepad, but only ever click on paint once... well if paint is hidden I have less to mouse through most of the time. Windows seems to fubar this up though and always hide the programs I use MOST rather than the ones I use least.
I chalk that up to the cliche MS having a good idea and an unuseable implementation. OTOH, KILL the search dog, and give an option to get rid of the wizards. Wizards usually suck for getting anything done, unless you are totally clueless about what you are trying to accomplish, in which case they help.
3. I'm of two minds about this... I absolutely hate to see functionality taken away. It feels like a step backward. However, it gets progressively harder to make a multi purpose program do each new function well, in a good UI and in an integrated manner. I personally think Opera does a good job here, especially with making it easy to enable only what you want to use.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
So are there any studies backing any of this up or is it all just personal opinions?
1. Skins are a good selling point. I also think the ability to make your workstation look, and work the way you want is a boon to efficiency.
Skins are a good OS feature. They're a silly application feature.
Making your machine look the way you want is nice, but if every application behaves differently (and has to be configured the same was as a separate step), it's just a pain in the ass.
If I go to the start menu 1000 times, and half of the time I click on notepad, but only ever click on paint once... well if paint is hidden I have less to mouse through most of the time.
Too bad you can't rearrange the start menu yourself, huh?
I chalk that up to the cliche MS having a good idea and an unuseable implementation.
That's possible. It might be like the assistants, where marketing told them to make the feature activate more often so people would notice it.
Statistically, it is possible to determine what applications you are more likely to use. It is vastly more difficult to determine what applications you are likely to use right now. And even so, menus that constantly change are impossible to memorize.
Skins just look like another way to break an application to me. It takes quite a bit of work to design a good sandboxed skinning framework, probably more work than designing a SpyBot remover.
If you want skinning, use X and QT or GTK, both support skinning out-of-the box at a toolkit level.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The sites of the "Others" you mention are (IMO) not very good themselves
http://www.zeldman.com/ - Darkish Green on Light Green poorly readable colours. No sitemap. Search box filled with a junk phrase that needs deleting before starting, and as filled not much space to click after this existing contents when about to delete it. Unclear section titles, alt text no better.
http://www.joeclark.org/ - Bigger than users chosen size text (as every thing is in lists) makes page too long. Use of non-standard 8-bit characters. No Sitemap.
http://www.webstandards.org/ - No search. No sitemap. Otherwise OK.
http://www.alistapart.com/ - No sitemap. No contents or short titles list in each section, you have to "More articles->" 10 at a time instead. Instead of link "Home" it is "Up Front" (Never heard of standard practices?)
The ALA site publishers include Zeldman, the Zeldman site contributors includes Joe Clark, the web standards site former major people includes Zeldman. The AC probably just likes this circle of styles, but on the other had maybe he is Zeldman himself? ;-)
> Why exactly would you need to skin your anti-Spyware program?
The author of Spybot goes to some lengths to support blind users, which can include a continuium of sight impairment. Sometimes a higher-contrast "skin" is just what's needed. There's also color-blind users, not technically sight impaired, but the first who would want to use a skin.
That was the original purpose anyway. The rest was third-party creations.
Well, I have seen one
.The author of Spybot goes to some lengths to support blind users, which can include a continuium of sight impairment. Either this is a really elaborate joke or your brain stopped working before you posted this. Using skinning to overcome problems with accessibility is like removing the roof from your house and then setting up a tent inside to keep the cold away.
Thanks - I've been using spybot once a week for months and never noticed I can skin it to match all my other stuff. I'm running about two dozen apps I skinned myself in the same style, so if spybot is all that skinnable, I'm about to make it number 25. Now what was that about consistency? If I can really make this program look and work more like 24 others - that is consistency.
"Hello Consistency! Say, you're sure breathing hard!"
"Yes Arti-(pant!) fakt, I just ran around the block to get back where I (pant! pant!) started."
I really do take consistency into account, and I'm just hoping spybot's one of the good skinable programs, and not one that is stubborn about only allowing limited tweaks that won't let me mimic similar functions in other programs consistently for my taste.
If there is a good reason why spybot has a skinning mechanism, we have to assume we both mean by that it has one sufficient to the task, which it sounds like you don't know one way or the other, and I won't know either until I try skinning it. In the meantime, I can see some reasons why spybot might need skinability, but I can't prove spybot's programmer thought of those same reasons.
As just one, maybe spybot can be skinned so a less-than clueful user can't turn off the backup all entries before deleting function, by not allowing the less-than-clueful to change some settings. Now 'consistency' would say that we should use the windows standard feature and gray out some button text, but it might be more effective to make that button go away entirely for some users. If I had some sort of admin authority over spybot but had to support end users on a large scale basis, I might like that.
Oh, the first poster wanted across the board consistency for randomly selected other people, a.k.a. all windows users.
That's where we seem to disagree. I use my home network. I built it, I paid for it, I own it, I maintain it. If I want to make anything "just look cool", that's my business, and any request for a reasonable explanation turns into a request I explain why I should be allowed to have a right before someone will acknowledge I have it. If it's my stuff, sombeody else isn't the person who decides which choices I make with it are reasonable and well thought out and which are not. I'll give someone like you a bit of a reasonable explanation, both because you told me something useful (Thanks again), and as a courtesy in general, but can you explain to me, in a rational-and-well-thought-out-manner, why you seem to be thinking you are entitled to critique how well I have or haven't thought about what I do with my property? We all tend to do this every time we see a middle aged guy buy a sports car, but I think we owe people the benefit of a doubt, i.e. if many customers are asking for skinability, then we should assume at least some of them have some good reasons unless there's some positive evidence they haven't, not proceed from the opposite assumption.
If something I choose makes it harder for 100 milllion other people to come into my home and use my systems, so what, they weren't invited to come into my home at all. If I want to be determined about it, easier for me personally is all that counts. I may even want to make it deliberately harder for everyone else in the world to use my stuff, just to get a color combination that I like seeing for what may be hours at a time, or just because I want to make it tougher for little Bobby to delete a file he shouldn't be deleting. Anyone who wants to move or delete files on my systems had better at least be willing to learn where the controls have been moved first.
Now pragmatically, I'm one of the people who will criticize a given skin design for having hard to find functions, limited usability, or more style than substance. I don't want to produce skins only I would find useable. It's just that even if somebody does deliberately produce a design only a few people, or even just one would prefer, I don't think its meaningful to claim that makes that person irrational or unthinking.
Who is John Cabal?
"Your final comment is appropriate. An interface that ignores art will likely look awkward or be otherwised noticed by the user, thus negatively affecting usability."
Thereby explaining the default look of Windows XP.
Listen, I'm glad and all you own your own network, but let's stop being dramatic for a moment, and think this through - why exactly would Spybot need a need skinnable interface? It does about 5 things total, and that's it. My problem with skinning is not so much that I can use it to make my apps look "pretty", but when I can't use the option to turn off the "pretty" and make it go back to the default. I have a modestly slow computer, and Spybot runs like a dead paraplegic in a snow storm - I honestly doubt this is because of it's memory-intensive operation, which doesn't even begin with the app, and yet it still runs slow. Why? Because Spybot runs a skinning engine, and doesn't have to, or should. Feel free to skin your Media Player, but please, give an option to turn it off.
Actually, here's a better idea - improve the default skinning mechanism of the operating system to allow for custom skins per app, in a selectable interface window somewhere as a settings window - this way you can share skins across several applications without having to rework them, and any "custom" buttons or panels can be added via this system, as opposed to a home-cooked engine.
A good guideline goes bad like the laws of physics and mathmatics go bad, which means not very often, or not at all.
Usability is a fundamental property. The human body and mind work in certain ways, and just because computers and technology have changed, it shouldn't affect usability at all. If anything, technology gives you more ability to conform to usability guidelines.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
The problem, plain and simple, is that whatever market you're in as a software developer, most likely the vast majority of potential clients will not care about usability. Oh, don't get me wrong, they'll want usability, as long as they don't have to pay extra for it.
The software products I develop at my day job suffer from this. There are major usability issues, but little to no manpower gets assigned to fixing them, because the customers ask for features, but they don't ask for a "nicer" form (or if they do, it's really low priority).
That's not to say there isn't a niche market that WILL pay for usability. The mac is proof positive of this. Even when the mac pretty much only had usability as a positive trait, people still paid exorbitant amounts for the apple goods, just because they actually were designed in compliance with usability guidelines. The thing is, the niche market is very much niche, and unless your product is purposefully niche as well, it's not big enough for you.
Elsewhere Nielsen advises designers to hide low-level error messages from users. Completely misguided.
One thing I've noticed adminning both GNU/Linux and legacy MS Windows boxes is how much easier it is to research issues in Linux. Plug the command and error output (command output, logs, etc.) into Google, and find the solution. That's GNU/Linux.
Windows. Well.... Is it "The Internet", or "Internet Explorer", or "MSIE", or "IE"? Since you can't copy and paste from an error dialog, what exactly was the error message? (Aside: I hate GNOME, but damned if they didn't get this right: popup error dialogs are copyable as text). Even program names are amazingly un-Googleable. "Um. Let's see if there's anything in Google for 'Word'". Almost as bad as Mission Impossible (the movie) where Cruise searches the Internet for "Job" (from the Bible)...and turns up zero hits. Um. Yeah. Nobody's ever posted a job listing.... Long and short of it: it's bloody difficult to Google for solutions. Also seems to be a cultural difference where people don't post their Windows issues (or at least not meaningfully).
Back to our story: yes, being able to identify the specific program, feature, and location of the error, and if at all possible, the precise error text. Succinctly. But specific.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
Seriously, you may have not seen what has happened with the gnome proyect, do you?
The point was in removing features to improve usability.
UnNetHack: NetHack Improved!
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